RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Germany disinclined to acquiesce to Obama’s Uighur request.

Means 'no.*'

As Track-A-‘Crat notes, the administration is at best spinning its difficulties to get anybody else to take the Uighurs. The President is claiming that there have been no hard commitments, which implies that negotiations for giving some over to Germany are still going on:

Strictly speaking, that may be true. But according to information obtained by SPIEGEL, Germany has long since blocked the idea of accepting Guantanamo detainees — and has done so without having to issue an outright rejection.

In talks at the end of May, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble presented US Attorney General Eric Holder with a list of criteria to be fulfilled before Germany would take nine Uighur detainees. Schäuble said Washington needed to present a clear case as to why the Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority in north-western China, couldn’t be taken in by the US or other countries. He also said America had to offer proof that they weren’t dangerous, and that they had a personal connection to Germany. He told Holder that Germany was unable to accept people who couldn’t travel to the US on a simple tourist visa.

Bolding mine, because that is a condition that has teeth in it. If this administration thought that it could get away with simply releasing the Uighurs, it would have done so by now. And that rule of thumb pretty much excludes everybody that’s left in Gitmo right now.

If this was all happening to some other country, I might be distantly sympathetic to the Uighur’s problems: of the remaining Gitmo detainees, they’re probably the most palatable… and if we hand them over to the People’s Republic of China, they’re dead men. Unfortunately for them, while merely training with al-Qaeda as preparation for an insurgency against the PRC might not deserve an effective death sentence, they did train with al-Qaeda. People are not inclined to take a detatched view on the subject; I’m one of them, and when it comes to this issue I’m firmly in the mainstream. Which is why this administration is scrambling to find somebody that will take them… and so far, failing. They have their own populations to consider, and said populations aren’t inclined to take a detatched view on the subject, either.

Actually, no, there is an answer to the quandary. It’s just that the Left has carefully conditioned its partisans into start shouting and pounding the table whenever it’s proposed… and is now discovering that it cannot simply turn that conditioning off, now that they are in power and actually have to do things.